Caving
by Princess180
Summary: Obligatory peice of postBring It On Home preNFBM fluff. Jackie and Hyde can't sleep. Not smut.


**Set post 'Bring It on Home'**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. This is just a bit of pre-NFBM fluff that I was inspired to write by my insane muse. My first T7S fanfic! **

Jackie couldn't sleep, she hadn't been able to sleep since she'd moved in with Donna. Donna hadn't noticed anything, since she'd taken to sleeping with earplugs in and burying herself under the pillows (Jackie had her telling Eric it was so she could pretend she was alone, that had felt a little bit bad, but not so much, that was why she played music every night, to make things like they used to be), Kelso and Fez wouldn't have noticed anything about her unless it had something to do with her bra, Eric had been commenting on the bags under her eyes until Steven had started glaring at him. Steven had noticed, immediately after her first night with Donna when she'd shown up in the basement.

He'd actually been worried, he'd asked her at least five times if she was all right, kept on looking at her strangely and when the guys came down to the basement and she'd moved to go sit on the couch like she normally did (Hyde wasn't exactly big on the PDA, as Jackie had learned since they'd gone public) he hadn't let her go, choosing instead to press a quick kiss to the side of her head when no one was looking and squeeze her waist slightly tighter. And she was really thankful for that, though she thought at the time she'd never tell him, his cot hadn't just been a place to sleep because she'd been scared sleeping all alone in her house, it had been warm, and smelled like him- and obviously because it was his bed and all, he'd been there. So, lying up against his shoulder, she'd actually started to doze off and was kind of glad she didn't have to move.

But now it was getting ridiculous, she'd been living with Donna for a week (she'd stopped calling it staying; her dad was in jail and her mother was in Mexico, or Tennessee, or whatever, she didn't really care), and no amount of pillow punching or Abba or reading the most boring parts of Donna's diary or thinking about boring things was putting her to sleep. And she'd finally admitted to herself that even if it did smell like socks, rotten thing, detergent, beer and Fez's cheap cologne and the bed was old and too small for two people to sleep in comfortably (especially not if one of those people was Steven, who could sleep through an earthquake), she wanted to go to the Hyde's room and probably wouldn't fall asleep until she did.

But she would not give in, she would not admit she needed him. Yes, they were dating, and yeah, once (and exactly once) he'd called her his girlfriend, but that did not mean that they had stopped pretending that it was just a making-out thing at least part of the time. Even if she did love him, differently than she had loved Michael, like maybe it meant something other than kisses and 'I love you, baby's. Maybe the fact that he refused to say it to her wasn't as a big a deal as she made it out to be half the time, because she just knew he did.

But none of that meant she would cave before he did. In some way.

* * *

Steven Hyde did not _need_ people. And he most certainly did not even _want_ to see Jackie at 1:43 AM on a Tuesday morning just to know that she was OK. And the fact that he was awake at 1:43 in the morning thinking about Jackie? Totally beside the point. Maybe not totally, she was his girl, which meant he had every right to worry about how she kept on falling asleep in the basement, or showing up at seven in the morning for no apparent reason. Seeing as she'd wormed her way into his life anyway and didn't appear to be leaving.

Huh, he'd even almost convinced himself with that last bit.

But anyway, he missed having her in his bed it had been... warmer when she was there, and the cute way she woke him up by kissing him in the early mornings when she snuck out? Not entirely unbearable. Or sometimes when she would have nightmares and he would have to pull her closer just to make her stop shaking because it was moving the bed (OK, he couldn't even have made Kitty believe him now), that was alright too.

He punched his nearly flat pillow for the fourteenth time in the same number of minutes, trying to distract himself from the thought of Jackie curled up against him, breathing softly and moving her lips in dreamed conversations. Shit, there it was again. Damn. OK, he'd think about anything but his Jackie.

Where the _hell_ had_ that_ come from?

Hyde decided he didn't want to know. So, instead of pondering when exactly Jackie Burkhardt, otherwise known as Satan, had become his, he thought about Red in a bikini. That normally made him both grossed out and tired from trying not to puke, yet somehow, Red just wouldn't get in the bikini, and he wasn't standing in the middle of Pricemart (which made it funnier), he was Jackie on a beach, not wearing a bikini, or really very much at all.

Hyde tried Zen, he didn't care, not at all. He was just going with the flow. And Jackie had been in the path of the flow.

Was the tree near Donna's window in the path of the flow? If Forman could climb it...

He was going to sleep or digging into his stash _now_, before he drove himself insane.

* * *

Jackie arrived at 6:30 the next morning for reasons that Kitty and Eric didn't understand but ignored while Eric was trying to somehow get out of going shopping with his mother. Currently he was bartering with not calling Laurie a slut for a whole month, but she doubted that would work. She clomped down the basement stairs, debating whether she wanted Steven to be awake so she could talk to him or asleep so she could wake him up with a kiss. Pushing the door to his room open, she found him sprawled out across his bed, taking up all of the room instead of pressed up against the wall like he always was when he was waiting for her to come down. She grinned as she sat down beside him, not able to stop herself from running a hand along his cheek. The she leant down and kissed him.

Hyde's lips reacted before his brain did, parting slightly and moving against Jackie's, his hand snaking around her waist while the other found her neck and pulled her down on top of him on the bed.

"Hey," he said, pulling back and letting her cuddle into his shoulder.

"Hey."

"You going to tell me why you're here?" Hyde asked after a few moments of silence while Jackie made herself comfortable.

"I was awake."

"Okay," Hyde said in his 'you're-completely-insane' voice, squeezing her waist tighter for a moment. "You know we're allowed to be in different rooms and awake, right?"

"There's a girl in your bed, Steven, are we really going to argue about this?" Jackie asked, sarcastic and really way to tired to argue with him- she'd never even _seen_ 6:30 in the morning before.

"Can I go back to sleep now?" he asked.

"If Mrs. Forman comes in it's your problem," Jackie warned, ominously, "I really don't want to hear more about how baby Jesus is watching me. It makes me feel all creepy."

"Sure, sweetheart," Hyde muttered, the name slipping out without his permission, he barely heard Jackie squeal before she kissed his cheek impulsively. He realized there was no way he could take that back and finally just pulled her in slightly closer (solely for warmth, obviously) and closed his eyes. "Wake me up if she does come down, yeah?"

"Mm," Jackie replied, kicking off her clogs and trying to fall asleep as quickly as possible. Coming over once the sun was up didn't count as caving- though maybe that 'sweetheart' did. Though he'd been doing that more and more lately, maybe she could count it as caving if he did it in front of someone else. Should Fez count as someone else? Or maybe Baby Jesus- if he was watching anyway?

That was a little bit pathetic, wasn't it? Whatever, she was sleep deprived.

* * *

Jackie knew Hyde hated school, Jackie knew he liked to skip, but damn it he _always_ ate lunch with her. He always picked her up at the door of her math room by grabbing her hand and led to her out to the El Camino to eat and _where the hell was he_? She might go eat with the cheerleaders just to bug him. Except, possibly for the third time in her life, Jackie didn't want to eat lunch with the cheerleaders. She wanted to eat cheese fries and make out with her poor, scruffy, pothead boyfriend in his stinky, icky car.

And, again with the pathetic.

She saw Eric walk past, his arm around Donna as he gestured emphatically- probably talking about Star Wars or something- Fez was walking behind them, candy bar in mouth, looking serenely happy in a very Fez way. Breaking her firm vow never to talk to Eric in school, she went over, she knew he had second period with Hyde, and if he had been there he'd better have a damned good explanation for not picking her up for lunch.

"Eric!" she said, quickly catching up with them- if she was going to do this she'd better keep it short. "Was Steven in Chem?"

"For a while. He cut the second half of class, something about lunch." Eric said, then he turned back to Donna, expounding, as predicted on what was going to happen in the next Star Wars movie. Eric watched as Jackie's face fell and, strangely, didn't feel typical happiness that came from giving her bad news.

"Oh, good, because I'm going to go eat with my cheerleader friends," Jackie said, making a quick exit towards her locker and thinking about going for a good, long cry in the girls washroom.

When she opened her locker, she didn't immediately notice the small piece of white paper taped loosely to a picture of her old horse, when she did, she assumed it was a note from one of her friends who had her locker combination and opened it without any real enthusiasm or interest.

_-Jacks_ It read

_I know you're ready to kill me, but I left a note. Ha. Now you can't say I abandoned you. I'll drive you home, OK? _

_-Hyde_

Jackie couldn't help but smile slightly as she looked at his quick scrawl which didn't follow the lines of the paper in any way shape or form, and was barely legible. But he had cared enough to tell her! OK, he hadn't exactly told her where he was, or why he had skipped lunch with her, but he had left a note, and realized she'd be ticked. Steven was beginning to understand relationships!!!

* * *

Jackie tried putting all her stuffed animals in bed with her, she tried getting three extra blankets, she talked to Donna for ages, she put on classical music stolen from Bob (she felt it might be best not to ask why he had it). As usual, nothing was putting her to sleep, and Donna looked like she was going to explode if Jackie even made a noise with her blanket, and Jackie was about to be forced to admit that she missed Steven when there was a crash through the window and Eric was jettisoned just beside her bed, looking a little bit confused.

"Did you really tell Fez he could watch you sleep?" He asked, sitting up and walking over to Donna's bed.

"Is he out there _again_?" Donna asked, moving over in her bed for her boyfriend.

"Yeah, he offered to pleasure Jackie endlessly, but I didn't think Hyde would be so happy about that," Eric said, sliding an arm around Donna's waist. "Speaking of endless pleasuring..." he used his 'seductive' voice, which under normal circumstances made everyone concerned laugh, but these were not normal circumstances, because Jackie was sleep-deprived and had just realized that it was entirely possible she loved Steven Hyde.

"EW!" she screamed.

"Shut up, Jackie, Bob could come in," Eric hissed.

"Then you should leave before I scream again," she snapped.

"Or you could leave," Eric suggested, equally snarky.

"I live here," Jackie pointed out.

"I was here first," Donna said, pointedly, "and it's my house." Jackie thought about his for a moment and

had a brilliant idea- a brilliant, evil, genius idea.

"Red's asleep right, Eric?" she asked, grinning, though she hoped neither of them could see it in the dark.

"Yeah."

"Steven's in the basement?" She asked next, her plan crystallizing.

"Please, Jackie, just tell us you're going to talk to Fez in the tree, I don't need to picture the unnatural blasphemy that is you and Hyde," Jackie bounced up, cheerful, ignoring Eric's whining on her way out the window (what- she'd gone through a super-spy faze in the fourth grade and her 'headquarters' had been a tree house.

Scrambling down, she waved at Fez, deciding not to try to explain to him what she was doing. He would probably be happier fantasizing about it anyway. She slid into the never locked door to the basement, making only a few sounds, using her perfected technique from those two weeks she'd slept here every night. She watched out for Eric's Lego as she crept nearer to Steven's room, not trusting the skinny teenager not to have somehow booby trapped the tiny hallway.

She slid the door open cautiously, thinking he would be asleep and she could just slip into bed with him and fall asleep- possibly leave before he woke up, too, just to be there with him without having to worry about explaining it away.

So Jackie was very surprised when she came into his room to find Hyde sitting up in his bed, with the lights still on and a magazine in his hand, though he was staring at the opposite wall. She grinned, as she came to sit beside him, trying not to get her hopes up, but inwardly doing every flip she'd ever learned as a cheerleader.

"Hey," she said after a few silent minutes, sliding her hand into his where it rested on his thigh.

"Hey."

"Eric was at Donna's," she offered, though she didn't really think he wanted an explanation. "I thought it might get gross in there. And it was either you or Bob."

"Glad to know I rate over Bob," Hyde grinned, he realized, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this was a very thinly disguised excuse because if Jackie had wanted to stay, she would have. And he would have had the way less pleasant company of a whining Forman about now. But, Hyde decided against rubbing it in- at least until the next morning.

"Sure you are, and if you hadn't been here I would have gone over to Michael's- but you're just so much closer," Jackie knew it was a bit of a low blow if he took it seriously, but he probably wouldn't.

"And, again, good to know," he said, trying to look Zen and failing miserably, extremely proud of the former brat. He pulled her back onto the bed as he lay down, pushing himself against the wall like he always did, and leaving almost enough room for her, but the tiny flat pillow didn't really work out for two people, so he 'had' to push her hair over one of her shoulders once they were both spooned together and nuzzle into her neck until they were both comfortable.

"Night, Pudding-Pop," Jackie said, hoping she could slip in the nickname just to make him squirm, but not enough for him to move from the extremely comfortable position they were in.

"Night, princess," he murmured, after processing the pudding-pop and deciding to let it lie, and frankly, princess had a good ring to it.

"Princess?" She asked, defying every Zen lesson he'd ever given her by letting it come out high and squeaky rather than sarcastic and throaty like she'd meant it to.

"Princess," Hyde confirmed, "my princess." What? He was half asleep, and maybe still a little dazed from the circle and... well... she was sexy. Oh, who the hell was he kidding? Jackie was slowly but surely turning him into Forman, and if she kept kissing his neck like that he might stop regretting it.

"Did you actually just say that?"

"Think I did. What the hell have you done to me, woman?"

"Improvements," she grinned and pulled his lips down to hers, "you like them?"

"I hate you."

"I know," she grinned and reattached their lips, wondering if he'd ever call her 'princess' again, it had a nice ring to it.

* * *

"Good morning, Jackie, Steven," Kitty said, coming into the Forman's kitchen the next morning, she barely even noticed any more when teenagers who didn't live there showed up not matter what time of day.

"Morning, Mrs. Forman," Jackie said, clearly, or at least to she and Hyde, speaking for both of them. Like he sometimes let her do. On little things like saying good morning to Kitty, and on slightly bigger things, like explaining why they were going out to Eric for the thousand-and-twelfth time, but if she made him go to one more school event without asking... alright, she'd pout and he'd give up instantly, so it was probably best to let that one just hang. He couldn't' quite admit how whipped he was yet.

"How long have you been here, Jackie?" Kitty asked, pulling a pan out from beneath the stove, Jackie bit her lip as soon as the older woman's back was turned, a sign that Hyde knew meant she wasn't entirely sure what to say, shooting a glance at the clock, he held up six fingers, the gestured like he was writing.

"Since six, Steven needed help with his homework," she lied, counting on Kitty being just a little bit hung over (she normally was).

"Aren't you a year younger than him?" Kitty said, whipping around. Hyde considered his options very carefully before making his next move, he could either admit to Kitty that Jackie had spent the night, come up with a more ridiculous lie, or doom himself to at least three days of simpering from his girlfriend and possibly his surrogate mother.

"My Jackie's brilliant, aren't you Princess?" He said, reaching over the few inches to kiss her nose. Jackie was looking at him as if he was totally insane (he doubted he wasn't- getting Jackie in trouble had once been his favorite hobby), and Kitty, as predicted almost melted to a puddle on the floor. Hyde took a moment as he pulled back to whisper "vapid cheerleader" into Jackie's ear, before biting down softly on the earlobe.

"Stoner screw-head," she hissed back, with a smile on her face. Hyde, despite himself, pressed a quick kiss to her temple.

"You two are just so _sweet_!" Kitty said, then promptly burst into tears, turned off the oven, and dashed out of the room.

"Steven?"

"Yeah, babe?"

"If I ever get like that please shoot me," Jackie said, pushing her chair slightly closer to his and tucking her head into his shoulder, properly awake for the first time in a while, just not quite ready to leave the warm and safe place that was Hyde's arms.

"Sure," Hyde said, grinning and waiting for the slap to come- they didn't really hurt, and she was cute when she was just a little bit mad. Damn sexy when she was very mad.

"Ste_ven_." He just grinned as Eric dashed in the door.

"Do you keep clothes here now?" He asked, noticing she was out of her pajamas and wearing jeans and a pink sweater.

"Didn't Donna tell you about Bob and the washing machine..." Jackie trailed off, not wanting to relive one of the worst experiences of her life yet again. Telling Steven had been hard enough, but he'd been covering for her washing all her clothes at the Forman's, seeing as the Pincioti's washing machine was clearly tainted. Hyde laughed, but stopped when she looked up at him angrily.

"Donna and I poured bleach on it," Eric said, "and I had to wipe it for ages." Hyde suddenly felt a great deal better about his level of whipped-ness.

"I will never, ever go in that room again," Jackie claimed, "ever. So I do my laundry here now."

"It took enough to get her to back into their house," Hyde, who at the time hadn't been trying to get his girlfriend to go home in any way, threw in.

"So is that why you're always here?" Eric asked.

"Kind of," Jackie said, before ending the conversation by tucking her head back into Hyde's shoulder. She didn't have to look to know that Eric had taken off to change his clothes before Red came downstairs and noticed. Besides, Hyde pressing another kiss to her forehead was signal enough for her that they were alone, she decided not to even consider what was making him so sweet this morning as she slid off of her chair and into his lap with practiced ease.

"Hey," he said, slipping his ever-present shades of and putting them on the collar of his shirt. "You know, Jacks, it's not so bad when you stay over," Hyde said, looking, if it was possible, slightly embarrassed. She giggled, and decided to go along with him, having learned that the second best way to deal with Steven (pouting came first) was to go 'Zen' right back at him.

"Yeah, I don't really mind it either."

"Well, if neither of us mind..." Hyde trailed off.

"We should do it once a week," she grinned at the look on his face, "I need my beauty sleep." Jackie bounced off his lap, kissing him on the cheek as she flew out the door. He was left staring and wondering how, exactly, he was ever expected to sleep again.


End file.
